Wednesday, April 30, 2014

"On April 26, 2014, the team held a meeting to discuss the incident. Both coaches and players expressed anger toward the comments and they briefly raised the possibility of boycotting Game 4 of their series against the Golden State Warriors on April 27, 2014 before deciding against it.[45] Instead, players protested Sterling's remarks by wearing their shirts inside-out in order "to obscure any team logo".[46] The next day, April 28, 2014, players of the Miami Heat wore their uniform tops inside-out to show solidarity with the Clippers. LeBron James commented on the situation saying, "There's no room for Donald Sterling in the NBA. There is no room for him". The owner of the Miami Heat, Micky Arison, also called the allegations “appalling, offensive and very sad".[47] NBA's Kevin Johnson, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Magic Johnson, Charles Barkley, Shaquille O’Neal, and Kobe Bryant also condemned Sterling's remarks.[48][49] Donald Trump stated his opinion that Sterling was set up by Stiviano,[50] while filmmaker Spike Lee said Sterling had the "mentality of a slave master. [Sterling] sees his players as slaves."[51]"

"“I’m confident that if we don’t raise the minimum wage in Congress before the election, the American people are going to speak about this at the ballot box in November,” said Senator Tom Harkin, Democrat of Iowa. “They’ll hold their elected officials responsible and accountable.”"

For new readers, I have to say, that the purpose of this blog is to get high school students, interested in Science. I want to make Science Relevant. I've had the fortune, to talk in front of students, from Grammar, to Graduate School. I believe some of my followers do not go to school anymore, I do not want to sound condescending to any reader. Today is Children's Day in Mexico, and this is what I write:

There are people in this world who will take any opportunity to steal from the rest of us. Some are easy to spot, and we call them criminals. Like the Wolf in the Little Red Riding Hood fairy tale, the Hunter comes and gets rid of him: All the Children Clap.

Kids, the world is not that simple, that is just the beginning of your education, Girls (Maria Vanessa Perez), be careful of the Big Bad Wolf (Donald Sterling), and if you fight him, let's hope the Hunter (Jimmy Brown) comes to the rescue.

I remember reading many years ago the beautiful book by G.H. Hardy: A Mathematician's Apology. Professor Hardy was proud that his work on number theory was useless outside of mathematics. At the same time I was reading Norbert Weiner's book: Cybernetics. I felt a great difference in attitude towards mathematics by both authors.

There is more to write about these men, and mathematics, here I just write a comment on a paper by Ramanujan I found today (see below).

I do invite my readers; those considering a career in mathematics, to reflect on the uses of this discipline. The financial industry, has used mathematical results to accumulate wealth on few individuals, who are acting against the development of mathematics, and knowledge in general, to protect their profits. This reflection can be informed by the recent book of Thomas Piketty: Capital in the Twenty-First Century.

There was no way Ramanujan could've known that the National Security Agency would pay in the 21st Century to uncover the secrets he left us. Nonetheless he knew the importance of the truths he was able to reveal.

Tuesday, April 29, 2014

An Electronic Information Engine, gets Information , and produces Information. To the extent that input and output are different we have an Information Engine. I know they work, because I have worked with three of them. E791, 5ESS, and Falcon. The first is really the name of one experiment at Fermilab, but it pioneered the use of clusters of PCs connected via TCP/IP, to work as a supercomputer. The second is the trade name of a Lucent product. Here I concentrate on the CME Globex Information Engine.

The Match Engine of Globex does the actual trade. Orders In, Orders Out. The Engine matches sellers and buyers, and produces Market Data. I believe this instance of the Engine starts the Big Data part of the computer cluster evolution. Google also has clusters of computers, and it definitely manages huge amounts of data, but given the regulatory constraints of Electronic Trade, Falcon has evolved in a practical way, that neither E791, nor 5ESS had to. During at least the last 5 years most of CME trade has gone from the old-fashioned trading floor, to GLOBEX. This company can now execute transactions in the nanosecond scale, thus producing Big Data.

"Donald Tokowitz Sterling (born Donald Tokowitz; April 26, 1934)[2] is an American business magnate and former attorney. He is the owner of the Los Angeles Clippers professional basketball franchise of the National Basketball Association (NBA). Sterling acquired the Clippers in 1981 for $12.5 million, and as of 2014, the team is valued at $575 million by Forbes magazine,[3] ranking them 18th out of 30 teams. At 33 seasons of ownership (1981 to present), Sterling has been the longest-tenured owner in the NBA since the death of Los Angeles Lakers majority owner Jerry Buss in 2013. On April 29, 2014, Sterling was banned from the NBA for life and fined $2.5 million by the NBA after recordings of him making racist comments were made public.[4]"

Monday, April 28, 2014

"WASHINGTON — The United States on Monday imposed additional sanctions against Russian government officials and companies deemed close to President Vladimir V. Putin, accusing Moscow of failing to live up to its agreement to defuse the crisis in Ukraine."

"One afternoon last December, an assassin on board a K.L.M. flight from Mexico City arrived at Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport. This was not a business trip: the killer, who was thirty-three, liked to travel, and often documented his journeys around Europe on Instagram. He wore designer clothes and a heavy silver ring in the shape of a grimacing skull. His passport was an expensive fake, and he had used it successfully many times. But, moments after he presented his documents to Dutch customs, he was arrested. The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration had filed a Red Notice with Interpol—an international arrest warrant—and knew that he was coming. Only after the Dutch authorities had the man in custody did they learn his real identity: José Rodrigo Arechiga, the chief enforcer for the biggest drug-trafficking organization in history, Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel."

Sunday, April 27, 2014

"A variable speed of light cosmology is formulated in which the speed of light is described in the action by a dynamical field ϕ. The initial value problems of cosmology: the horizon and flatness problems are solved. The model predicts primordial scalar and tensor fluctuation spectral indices ns=0.96 and nt=−0.04, respectively. The BICEP2 observation of r=0.2 yields r/nt=−5 which is close to the single field inflationary consistency condition r/nt=−8."

"It is, in a way, too bad that Cliven Bundy — the rancher who became a right-wing hero after refusing to pay fees for grazing his animals on federal land, and bringing in armed men to support his defiance — has turned out to be a crude racist. Why? Because his ranting has given conservatives an easy out, a way to dissociate themselves from his actions without facing up to the terrible wrong turn their movement has taken."

"The algorithms that simple feedback neural circuits representing a brain area can rapidly carry out are often adequate to solve only easy problems, and for more difficult problems can return incorrect answers. A new excitatory-inhibitory circuit model of associative memory displays the common human problem of failing to rapidly find a memory when only a small clue is present. The memory model and a related computational network for solving Sudoku puzzles produce answers that contain implicit check-bits in the representation of information across neurons, allowing a rapid evaluation of whether the putative answer is correct or incorrect through a computation related to visual 'pop-out'. This fact may account for our strong psychological feeling of right or wrong when we retrieve a nominal memory from a minimal clue. This information allows more difficult computations or memory retrievals to be done in a serial fashion by using the fast but limited capabilities of a computational module multiple times. The mathematics of the excitatory-inhibitory circuits for associative memory and for Sudoku, both of which are understood in terms of 'energy' or Lyapunov functions, is described in detail."

Friday, April 25, 2014

Joel Lebowitz has worked for years on Ergodic Theory. I got interested in Quantum Chaos, via Classical Chaos. Intuitively I did not feel comfortable with two different sources of randomness. In Classical Statistical Mechanics the source is our lack of information on the system, in Quantum Chaos I thought the source was deeper, with uncertainty measured by Planck's Constant. Two classical billiards colliding will go in random ways afterwards. Lebowitz studied problems like those.

Now I am considering a proposal: Randomness comes from Quantum Entanglement.

I do not like this proposal much, unless the wave function is a real physical field, a la de Broglie-Bohm interpretation.

"The renewed interest in the foundations of quantum statistical mechanics in recent years has led us to study John von Neumann's 1929 article on the quantum ergodic theorem. We have found this almost forgotten article, which until now has been available only in German, to be a treasure chest, and to be much misunderstood. In it, von Neumann studied the long-time behavior of macroscopic quantum systems. While one of the two theorems announced in his title, the one he calls the "quantum H-theorem", is actually a much weaker statement than Boltzmann's classical H-theorem, the other theorem, which he calls the "quantum ergodic theorem", is a beautiful and very non-trivial result. It expresses a fact we call "normal typicality" and can be summarized as follows: For a "typical" finite family of commuting macroscopic observables, every initial wave function ψ0 from a micro-canonical energy shell so evolves that for most times t in the long run, the joint probability distribution of these observables obtained from ψt is close to their micro-canonical distribution."

"UNHCR works with a wide variety of people of concern in Eastern Europe, ranging from asylum-seekers within mixed-migration flows, refugees and returnees to internally displaced people (IDPs) and stateless people. Compared to other parts of the world, Eastern Europe receives a relatively low number of asylum-seekers. However, frequent reorganizations of State bodies responsible for border management, migration and asylum and the priority given to political and other considerations can leave national asylum systems either dysfunctional or lagging far behind international norms."

"An estimated 9 million Syrians have fled their homes since the outbreak of civil war in March 2011, taking refuge in neighbouring countries or within Syria itself. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), about 2.5 million have fled to Syria's immediate neighbours Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan and Iraq. 6.5 million are internally displaced within Syria. Meanwhile, under 100,000 have declared asylum in Europe with a small number offered resettlement by countries such as Germany and Sweden."

"It is shown how to resolve the apparent contradiction between the macroscopic approach of phase space and the validity of the uncertainty relations. The main notions of statistical mechanics are re-interpreted in a quantum-mechanical way, the ergodic theorem and the H-theorem are formulated and proven (without "assumptions of disorder"), followed by a discussion of the physical meaning of the mathematical conditions characterizing their domain of validity."

"We study the problem of the approach to equilibrium in a macroscopic quantum system in an abstract setting. We prove that, for a typical choice of "nonequilibrium subspace", any initial state (from the energy shell) thermalizes, and in fact does so very quickly, on the order of the Boltzmann time τB:=h/(kBT). This apparently unrealistic, but mathematically rigorous, conclusion has the important physical implication that the moderately slow decay observed in reality is not typical in the present setting.
The fact that macroscopic systems approach thermal equilibrium may seem puzzling, for example, because it may seem to conflict with the time-reversibility of the microscopic dynamics. According the present result, what needs to be explained is, not that macroscopic systems approach equilibrium, but that they do so slowly.
Mathematically our result is based on an interesting property of the maximum eigenvalue of the Hadamard product of a positive semi-definite matrix and a random projection matrix. The recent exact formula by Collins for the integral with respect to the Haar measure of the unitary group plays an essential role in our proof."

Lebowitz and Goldstein (below) speculate, that nonequilibrium systems reach equilibrium slowly. Much slowly than Boltzmann's Time. This speculation, besides of being observed, allows them to better describe the theory of Quantum Entanglement for the real world, of quantum computers and such. They can also explain the arrow of time.

Entanglement was proposed by Albert Einstein, as spooky action at a distance, but was proven by John Bell as a mathematical certainty. Now there are multiple experimental demonstrations of its existence. What is missing is the demonstration that Einstein had the right ideas to go beyond the wrong ideas of John von Neumann, and other scientists who were supported by the US to the expense of Einstein. Somebody loses, and somebody wins. David Bohm, Albert Einstein, and the rest of humanity were the losers, the winners were the warmongers.

"The Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) is a worker-based human rights organization internationally recognized for its achievements in the fields of corporate social responsibility, community organizing, and sustainable food. The CIW is also a leader in the growing movement to end human trafficking due to its groundbreaking work to combat modern-day slavery and other labor abuses common in agriculture. The CIW works in three broad and overlapping spheres:"

"By now, you’ve probably heard of Thomas Piketty, the 42-year-old French economist and author of Capital in the Twenty First Century. Piketty has become something of a rock star in the economics world. Capital has been sold out for weeks and is No. 1 on Amazon’s bestseller list. He’s currently on tour—drawing overflow crowds to bookstores and lecture halls in Washington D.C., New York, Boston and San Francisco."

"We consider an isolated, macroscopic quantum system. Let H be a micro-canonical "energy shell," i.e., a subspace of the system's Hilbert space spanned by the (finitely) many energy eigenstates with energies between E and E + delta E. The thermal equilibrium macro-state at energy E corresponds to a subspace H_{eq} of H such that dim H_{eq}/dim H is close to 1. We say that a system with state vector psi in H is in thermal equilibrium if psi is "close" to H_{eq}. We show that for "typical" Hamiltonians with given eigenvalues, all initial state vectors psi_0 evolve in such a way that psi_t is in thermal equilibrium for most times t. This result is closely related to von Neumann's quantum ergodic theorem of 1929."

"Using a combination of Eulerian and Lagrangian variables we obtain some exact results and good approximation schemes for the time evolution of the electron flow from a no-current state to a final stationary current state in a planar one-dimensional diode. The electrons can be injected externally or generated by the cathode via field emission governed by a current-field law. The case of equipotential electrodes and fixed injection is studied along with a positive anode potential. When the current is fixed externally the approach to the stationary state goes without oscillations if the initial electron velocity is high enough and the anode can absorb the injected flow. Otherwise the accumulated space charge creates a potential barrier which reflects the flow and leads to its oscillations, but our method of analysis is invalid in such conditions. In the field emission case the flow goes to its stationary state through a train of decaying oscillations whose period is of the order of the electron transit time, in agreement with earlier studies based on perturbation techniques. Our approximate method does not permit very high cathode emissivity, though the method works when the stationary current density is only about 10% smaller than the Child-Langmuir limit."

"Joel L. Lebowitz (born May 10, 1930 in Taceva, then in Czechoslovakia) is a mathematical physicist widely acknowledged for his outstanding contributions to statistical physics, statistical mechanics and many other fields of Mathematics and Physics."

"Elena Poniatowska (born May 19, 1932) is one of Mexico's best known journalists and authors, specializing in works on social and political issues focused on those considered to be disenfranchised especially women and the poor. She was born in Paris to upper class parents, including her mother whose family fled Mexico during the Mexican Revolution.[1] She left France for Mexico when she was ten to escape the Second World War. When she was eighteen and without a university education, she began writing for the newspaper Excélsior, doing interviews and society columns. Despite the lack of opportunity for women from the 1950s to the 1970s, she evolved to writing about social and political issues in newspapers, books in both fiction and nonfiction form. Her best known work is La noche de Tlatelolco (The night of Tlatelolco, the English translation was titled "Massacre in Mexico") about the repression of the 1968 student protests in Mexico City. She is considered to be “Mexico's grande dame of letters” and is still an active writer."

David Bohm was a different kind of physicist, than the ones that monopolized budgets for Theoretical Physics in the US, during the second half of last century. It seems to me, that he was punished for not helping the War Effort in the US.

Now we have to start where he left off. There is more to Quantum Mechanics, than what John von Neumann wanted us to believe. I thank my friend Kris Krogh for informing me about this "heretical" work.

"The fact that macroscopic systems approach thermal equilibrium may seem puzzling, for example, because it may seem to conflict with the time-reversibility of the microscopic dynamics. We here prove that in a macroscopic quantum system for a typical choice of "nonequilibrium subspace", any initial state indeed thermalizes, and in fact does so very quickly, on the order of the Boltzmann time τB:=h/(kBT). Therefore what needs to be explained is, not that macroscopic systems approach equilibrium, but that they do so slowly."

We will all tell our children of the dark days of the Great Lime Shortage of 2014, when Mexican restaurants raised their margarita prices and otherwise respectable bars committed the blasphemy of serving gin and tonics with a slice of lemon. The shortage has become the subject of news media fascination, with the latest piece on the front page of Friday’s Wall Street Journal.

What’s going on? Because of a combination of bad weather, disease and supply-restricting behavior by Mexican drug cartels, the wholesale price of a case of limes has soared to about $100 from around $15, rendering what was once a bargain fruit a luxury item. The Latin grocery store near my house has raised its price to 69 cents each from eight-for-a-dollar, which Excel tells me is a 452 percent increase.

Let’s blame Janet Yellen.

After all, the United States imports most of its limes from Mexico, and years of ultra-low interest rates and money-printing by the Federal Reserve, led by Ms. Yellen, have debased the dollar, making the cost of imported limes higher than it otherwise would be. All this cheap money has probably also fueled speculative activity in the lime markets, pushing up the cost of mojitos, tom kha gai soup and other lime-reliant treats.

That’s nonsense, of course. Unless Ms. Yellen has some heretofore unknown tie to the Knights Templar or power over the weather, the Fed has nearly nothing to do with lime prices. Rather, it is all about the idiosyncratic supply and demand within the market for limes, in which the reduced supply of limes is met by higher prices.

But while it’s pretty clearly absurd to blame the Fed for the sharp rise in lime prices, that doesn’t stop people from falling for the same convoluted logic whenever more economically significant commodities are involved, particularly oil and major food crops like corn.

Whenever the price of those commodities spikes, you hear an outpouring of blame directed at central bankers. It happened in the summer of 2008, when gasoline and food prices were skyrocketing. It happened again in early 2011, when commentators were quick to blame the Fed’s quantitative easing policies for a commodity price bump.

Of course, the causes of those price rises were broader than the causes of the limeflation now afflicting the world: The rapid growth of China and other emerging markets created strong demand for commodities in 2008, and the Arab Spring a few years later created fears of future disruption to Middle East oil supplies.

But in both episodes, you could turn on CNBC or tune in to a congressional hearing to hear elaborate explanations of how low-interest-rate policies were creating a buildup of speculative pressure in futures markets, causing a run-up in prices not for any fundamental reason other than central bank money printing.

There was a more sophisticated and reasonable version of the same logic that made the rounds within central banks: It wasn’t that easy money was the cause of rising commodity prices, but that as higher prices were rippling out into other goods, people were led to expect higher inflation, which can be self-fulfilling. And it is of course true that if prices for the full range of goods and services people buy are rising rapidly, it is a sign that the central bank is creating too much money and should raise interest rates. But one-off rises in commodity prices, whether it’s something important to the economy like oil or more marginal like limes, aren’t the same as broad-based inflation. Rather, they are usually individual markets adjusting to changes in supply and demand.

But, according to transcripts of its policy meetings released this year, fear of the run-up in commodity prices kept the Fed from cutting interest rates in the late summer of 2008 when a financial crisis was spiraling out of control. It led the European Central Bank to undertake spectacularly ill-timed interest rate increase in both the summer of 2008 and the spring of 2011, as the central bankers fretted about commodity-driven inflation instead of the crises staring them in the face.

Next time there is a sharp rise in the price of crude oil or corn or copper or all three, we would do well to ignore the catcalls aimed at central bankers and just ask: Is this really an outbreak of broad-based inflation? Or is this just a bigger, more economically consequential version of the Lime Crisis of 2014?

Otherwise, the results for the economy will be awfully sour.

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"We will all tell our children of the dark days of the Great Lime Shortage of 2014, when Mexican restaurants raised their margarita prices and otherwise respectable bars committed the blasphemy of serving gin and tonics with a slice of lemon. The shortage has become the subject of news media fascination, with the latest piece on the front page of Friday’s Wall Street Journal."

All our former experience with application of quantum theory seems to say: {\it what is predicted by quantum formalism must occur in laboratory}. But the essence of quantum formalism - entanglement, recognized by Einstein, Podolsky, Rosen and Schr\"odinger - waited over 70 years to enter to laboratories as a new resource as real as energy. This holistic property of compound quantum systems, which involves nonclassical correlations between subsystems, is a potential for many quantum processes, including ``canonical'' ones: quantum cryptography, quantum teleportation and dense coding. However, it appeared that this new resource is very complex and difficult to detect. Being usually fragile to environment, it is robust against conceptual and mathematical tools, the task of which is to decipher its rich structure. This article reviews basic aspects of entanglement including its characterization, detection, distillation and quantifying. In particular, the authors discuss various manifestations of entanglement via Bell inequalities, entropic inequalities, entanglement witnesses, quantum cryptography and point out some interrelations. They also discuss a basic role of entanglement in quantum communication within distant labs paradigm and stress some peculiarities such as irreversibility of entanglement manipulations including its extremal form - bound entanglement phenomenon. A basic role of entanglement witnesses in detection of entanglement is emphasized.

"Together with Jonathan Oppenheim and Andreas Winter, he discovered quantum state-merging and used this primitive to show that quantum information could be negative. He also co-discovered the Peres-Horodecki criterion for testing whether a state is entangled, and used it to find bound entanglement together with his brother Paweł Horodecki and father Ryszard Horodecki."

In the early 70s I entered the Physics Department of the Research and Advanced Studies Center (CINVESTAV) in Mexico City.

Professor Mumtaz Zaidi received a PhD degree, working with Edwin Salpeter in 1960, on Lamb Shift Excitation Energy In the Ground State of The Helium Atom, from Cornell University. Professor Zaidi accepted me as a student at CINVESTAV. Professor Arnulfo Zepeda Domínguez, who still works at CINVESTAV, was recommended by Prof. Zaidi for a research stay at Rockefeller University. Zepeda worked with Heinz Pagels at Rockefeller. A few years later Seth Lloyd, from England, worked with Pagels as well.

Nowadays Zepeda works in Theoretical Physics, and Lloyd, now at MIT, does also.

I feel grateful to have known Zaidi and Zepeda personally. Zaidi taught me Statistical Mechanics, and Zepeda, Quantum Field Theory.

Currently I am working on the Foundations of Quantum Mechanics, following the discoveries of Seth Lloyd.

"Heinz Rudolf Pagels (February 19, 1939 – July 23, 1988) was an American physicist,[1] an adjunct professor of physics at Rockefeller University, the executive director and chief executive officer of the New York Academy of Sciences, and president of the International League for Human Rights. He is best known to the general public for his popular science books The Cosmic Code (1982), Perfect Symmetry (1985), and The Dreams of Reason: The Computer and the Rise of the Sciences of Complexity (1988)."

"Given any Hamiltonian and any initial state spread over many discrete energy levels, we show that most observables are already equlibrated, and that most observables with a definite initial value (which are typically initially out of equilibrium) equilibrate fast. Moreover, all two-outcome measurements, where one of the projectors is of low rank, equilibrate fast."

"My main research interest is in fundamental aspects of quantum physics; basically I am interested in getting a better understanding of the nature of quantum behavior. The fact that so often one discovers seemingly paradoxical new quantum effects is a signature that a deep and intuitive understanding is still missing. A major focus of my research has been quantum non-locality. For most of its history, the subject of quantum non-locality was primarily of interest to philosophers of physics. My research aim was to go beyond philosophy and to develop an understanding of the physics of non-locality. This led me to establish some of the central concepts of the new area of quantum information and computation. I have also worked on many other aspects of quantum theory, ranging from the very fundamental, to designing practical experiments (such as the first teleportation experiment) to patentable commercial applications."

"Quantum nonlocality is the phenomenon by which the measurements made at a microscopic level necessarily refute one or more notions (often referred to as local realism) that are regarded as intuitively true in classical mechanics. Rigorously, quantum nonlocality refers to quantum mechanical predictions of many-system measurement correlations that cannot be simulated by any local hidden variable theory. Many entangled quantum states produce such correlations when measured, as demonstrated by Bell's theorem."

"We present a framework for extending thermodynamics to individual quantum systems, including explicitly a thermal bath and work-storage device (essentially a 'weight' that can be raised or lowered). We then prove that the second law of thermodynamics holds in our framework, and give a simple protocol to extract the optimal amount of work from the system (equal to its change in free energy). Our results apply to any quantum system in an arbitrary initial state, in particular including non-equilibrium situations. The optimal protocol is essentially reversible, similar to classical Carnot cycles, and indeed, we can use it to construct a quantum Carnot engine."

Specialization in Mexican and Spanish American Literature. Author of Un giro en espiral. El proyecto literario de Juan José Arreola (1992); editor and coauthor of Y diversa de mí mísma entre vuestras plumas ando. Homenaje internacional a Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (El Colegio de México, 1993); editor and co-author of Sor Juana y su mundo. Una mirada actual (1995); editor and co-author of El cuento mexicano. Homenaje a Luis Leal (1996); author of Los guardaditos de Sor Juana (1999); editor and coauthor of En gustos se comen géneros. Congreso Internacional Comida y Literatura (3 vols.; 2003); coeditor and coauthor of Cien años de lealtad. En honor a Luis Leal/ One Hundred Years of Loyalty. In Honor of Luis Leal (2007); editor and coauthor ofRealidades y Fantasías. Realities and Fantasies. Ninth Colloquium on Mexican Literature. In Memoriam Tim McGovern (1965-2006) (2009). She has written over one hundred publications, including books, book chapters and papers. Her articles on Juan José Arreola, Carlos Fuentes, Juan Rulfo, Jaime Torres Bodet, Josefina Vicens, Carlos Fuentes, Elena Poniatowska, Sergio Pitol, José Emilio Pacheco, and Ignacio Solares, among others, have been published in academic and general-interest journals. She works above all on women writers, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Mexican Culture, and Theater (XVII and XVIII century), and on contemporary romance and short stories (XXI Century Literature). For her studies on Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, she was awarded the “Woman of the Year” (1997) distinction by the Mexican-American Opportunity Foundation (Los Angeles, California). She received the Literary Medal “Antonio Mediz Bolio” (Mérida, Yucatán, 2000) and the State Parliament Medal “Héctor Victoria Aguilar” (Mérida, Yucatán, 2008). In 2001, she was a member of the jury for the Juan Rulfo Latin-American and Caribbean Prize, awarded to the Mexican writer Juan García Ponce (Guadalajara International Book Fair). She is co-founder of the UC-Mexicanistas Association, an Intercampus Research Program of the University of California System, and one hundred percent Mexicanist and Mexican in California.

Thursday, April 24, 2014

I just posted a note on the Ukraine and the Hot Lands of Michoacan, Mexico. Then I read a note in Newsweek by an English journalist who was threatened in Ukraine. Finally I read Paul Krugman's piece today in the NYT.

Wow!

Like in One Hundred Years of Solitude by the late Gabriel Garcia Marquez, I feel like the last of the Buendias who finally understands the parchments carried by Melquides the gypsy:

The most important presence in the novel outside of the major Buendía male and female characters is the gypsy Melquíades, whose manuscript turns out to be the narrative of the Buendías. He is the gypsy friend of José Arcadio Buendía I, and he introduces Macondo to a host of fabulous things — flying carpets, magnets, daguerreotypes, ice, telescopes, and so on. He appears at the very beginning of the book and reappears in various ghostly reappearances; he stays around until Aureliano Babilonia begins the task of completing the translation of the parchment manuscripts — which Melquíades gives to José Arcadio BuendíaCliff Notes

On the night of April 21, I got a call from a member of the Sloviansk, Ukraine, Self-Defense, the pro-Russia activists in control of the city. I was in Kramatorsk, about 8 miles away, and I was asked to vouch for two journalists who wanted to enter the barricaded compound.

One of them is Simon Ostrovsky, a respected American-Israeli journalist best known for his work with Vice News. I give my strong backing to the soundness of Ostrovsky, whom I know to be a good professional journalist, and his colleague, then I send them a message telling them to be careful.

That night, Ostrovsky was seized from one of the city’s pro-Russia occupied municipal buildings behind the barricades, taken captive and accused of being a provocateur, producing propaganda against the new people’s republic.

The Self-Defense had my number because I’d made sustained efforts to build good relations with them. Why I’d done that—and why I knew to be careful—went back to an incident the week before.

Driving between Lugansk and Sloviansk in Ukraine, both pro-Russia cities near the Russian border, to witness for myself the seizing of municipal buildings by pro-Russia forces, I’m feeling pretty chipper.

I exchange banter with my traveling companion, a fellow British journalist, as the perimeter checkpoint of Sloviansk, a city of some 120,000 inhabitants, hoved into view and continue chatting in a light-hearted manner with the checkpoint guards as we pass through.

Then, suddenly, the car is surrounded. I hear the unmistakable sound—though I’d never heard it firsthand before—of guns being cocked, accompanied by high-velocity instructions in Russian to get out of the car. Doing as we are bidden, we are next told by men in full-face balaclavas and in full camouflage fatigues to place our hands on the top of the car.

Then, almost as quickly as it erupted, the tense situation is defused as I proffer explanations, which, to my surprise, are readily accepted: We are journalists going to see what is happening. We are sent on our way with good wishes from men who the minute before had cocked guns pointed at us. It’s a sharp introduction to the elevated intensity level in Sloviansk.

Badly shaken, we down a vodka to calm our nerves at the first hotel we came to. Then I stepped out to take a phone interview in the lobby, relaying the events at the checkpoint just as they happened. Sitting and taking all this in was an older woman, seemingly the manager of the hotel.

Her English was clearly good enough for her to get the gist of what I was saying: Her city was surrounded by men with guns, which they seemed ready to use. After she had heard enough, she shoved us out of the hotel and locked the door behind us. As we got in the car, the woman got on the phone, looking right at us through the curtains. It was a foreboding introduction to a city that until the troubles started was best known for its spas and saunas.

That Saturday night in Sloviansk was a fairly anarchic free-for-all as new barricades were thrown up around the seized police headquarters in the city center and massed crowds gathered at nightfall to sing their support for the pro-Russia activists, who seemed to be coming out of the night to form a mash-up of an idealistic band of “realm defenders” and an unruly mob of thugs.

Getting behind the barricades wasn’t difficult, and we walked around, filming fairly freely. We were asked who we were and why we were there, just as we had been quizzed in Donetsk the week before. Then came Sunday morning, a rainy day with tension cutting the muggy air as the pro-Russians who had taken the public buildings feared they would soon be stormed by official Ukrainian forces. Still I spent much of the day filming from inside the barricades.

I spoke with and filmed members of the Self-Defense. Mostly young guys, bit rough around the edges, not exactly predisposed to placing trust in foreign journalists, but essentially OK. When I tried to go back to the barricades on Sunday night, they politely declined that request with, “We’re thinking of your safety. Things are different in the night.”

But on Monday, I was stopped at gunpoint in the street by a Self-Defense guy demanding to see my credentials. I am marched into the barricades, told to get on my knees, surrounded by guns, balaclavas and camouflage, and I am searched, sharply questioned as to who I am and what I am doing there. I tell them the truth, and they seem to accept it. I am set free.

Talking myself out of that tight spot, the scariest experience of my life so far, fills me with confidence for the following day. I make my way to the central Sloviansk barricade area, start filming and almost immediately heavily armed men are running toward me. I’m shoved, my camera and phone are removed, and before I know quite what’s happening, I’m being marched at gunpoint into a nearby car. My captors shout, “He’s a spy,” to concerned passersby, who then nod and look away.

In the car, the older of my two captors, wearing a full-face balaclava but clearly a thick set man perhaps in his late 30s, points a Kalashnikov at me. It soon becomes clear that being a spy is only part of my problem. He yells at me several times that I’m a “narcoman” (drug addict). We arrive at a local hospital, where my captor declares he has “captured a spy and drug addict.” I try to insist that I’m an English journalist, but he barks me down with, in Russian, “Those who want to live keep quiet.”

Entering the hospital, any hope I might have of arriving in a safe place is shattered as the doctors and nurses immediately defer to my captors and will not meet my gaze. I’m sat down, and it becomes clear that I am about to be given a drug test.

I’ve no idea why my captors think I’m an addict, my sum experience of drugs—apart from a university dabble—being a few joints in Amsterdam many years ago. The older captor tells me that if I fail the drug test, “You will be shot.” The younger captor is playing the good cop, but even he informs me that “in the Donetsk Republic, drug addicts are shot.”

So I give a urine sample and put my life in the hands of a Ukrainian drug test. I’d never before been in a situation of imminent existential danger. I believe they would follow through on the ultimatum simply because, as the older one informs me, “It’s a war now.” The rules of their self-declared people’s republic say that the punishment for being a drug addict is execution.

In those moments, as a nice-looking nurse conducts the test with her hands shaking, and a doctor stands in the corner with his hands deep in his pockets, looking out the window, I begin to understand something about death. Or at least the death I would receive. It would be by bullet, quick, over.

Instant drug tests are never 100 percent accurate, and under these circumstances I can place little confidence in the accuracy of the outcome. I think the hardest thought I can: that I might never look into the loving eyes of my mother again or hug my father. Then, as I’m struggling to control myself, the result is in. It’s all clear.

This satisfies the younger captor, but not the older, who quizzes the nurse about the accuracy of the test. She tells him there is another over-the-counter drug test, called Sniper, and I’m bundled back into a taxi and driven across town to a pharmacy where we purchase it. (I have to pay for it. And the taxi.)

I’m back to the hospital with the older captor, whose name I discover is Vasya. The test is taken and this time shows I may have used marijuana. Vasya gets very excited at this, as it seemingly backs up his earlier suspicions. The nurses and the doctor inform Vasya the result is not conclusive, and the only place that can provide a definitive judgment is in the city of Donetsk, about 70 miles away.

So we set off for Donetsk with a well-built doctor from the hospital sitting in the front of the taxi while Vasya slumbers with me in the back. In Donetsk, finally, there is some semblance of civil structure. The doctors there, two proper ladies called Ludmila and Lena, challenge Vasya and ask for official documentation from his people’s republic showing that I am an official prisoner.

Vasya, still in his full-face balaclava, starts heckling them with talk of the “right of the people,” etc., that he has a daughter in Sloviansk from whom he wishes to keep “drug addicts and spies” like myself. The doctors declare I can only submit to drug testing under my own will and that there will be a fee. I give my consent, and Vasya offers them my money. The doctors are unhappy with this and agree to do the tests for free.

The doctors say the results of the test will not be known for 10 days. Vasya is very unhappy with this and beats them down to three days. I take the tests, struggling to produce urine, as I hadn’t even had a cup of coffee before I was captured. I am given some water.

As I’m doing this, the doctors start to pay attention to Vasya, with his sandaled feet in filthy bandaging that hardly conceals weeping sores. They dress his swollen feet, and a doctor tells him he’s in poor health and should be kept in for observation. Vasya says he has to go back to his brothers on the barricades.

After Vasya’s yellow bandages are replaced with fresh white ones and his feet treated, his mood improves sharply. He has a new plan now. He won’t kill me, but he will expose me to the media as the “drug addict and spy” he is still convinced I am. When we stop at a pro-Russia checkpoint, I gratefully gobble down food offered to me by the ladies working at the roadside buffet. It’s the first I’ve eaten or drunk, all day—apart from water for urine purposes.

Vasya is grateful, too, so much so that he drops his guard and reverts to speaking Ukrainian. He is immediately surrounded by security forces who accuse him of being a “provocateur” and a pro-Kiev spy. Vasya has no ID and for a few minutes seems in trouble.

I look on, still eating, enjoying this sudden reversal of roles. After he makes a phone call to a Sloviansk Self-Defense member to prove his pro-Russia sympathies, we are free to leave. In the car, he waves his gun around at passing vehicles as we return to where it all began. Nine hours later, I’m freed.

Back in the police station, the search for my camera and phone starts. I’m sitting behind the bars, kind of still in captivity but clearly on the way out. A senior member commandant marches right in front of where I sit, takes out a gun and fires it into the roof. It’s the first time I’ve heard gunshot, and it’s accompanied by his screaming that if my camera and phone aren’t found, that bullet will be fired into someone.

It’s all to no avail. They aren’t found, and after firing his gun, the commandant disappears and things start to wind down. Vasya now seems a bit sorry for himself, pulls his balaclava down and goes into a sulk. I’m then taken for a final round of questioning. My interrogators come back and declare that my gravest crime is not being a drug addict or a spy, but being “too curious.” I was free to go.

My phone and camera were never returned. Two days later I was at a Ukrainian army base and was again ordered on my knees at gunpoint before being detained for questioning. But it didn’t seem a big deal any more.

I’m still here in Sloviansk and, with events moving at lightning speed every day, the results of that drug test in Donetsk, upon which once my life depended, appear not to mean anything to anyone anymore. Even me.